Quotes for New Seasons

  Every once in a while I return to the thoughts that are brief. Today is a day like that.   I am thinking about bracing up the inner landscape in preparation for new seasons ahead.  And amid the flurry of details and changing schedules, this always means being someone true.  And seeing the thing right in front of you very well.  And doing something good with it.  Here are the small thoughts in front of me that are once again becoming big today. 


"A man's style is his voice.  Wood minds, wooden voices." - Emerson

"The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but what they miss." - Thomas Carlyle




"Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal." - Thomas Moore

"Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity." - James F. Byrnes

"Resolve and though art free." - Longfellow

"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue." - G.K. Chesterton

"There is a paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so." - Charles Caleb Colton

"A man's feet should be planted firmly in his country, but his eyes should survey the world." - George Bernard Shaw

"Observation - activity of both eyes and ears." - Horace Mann

"It is the dim haze of mystery that adds enchantment to pursuit." - Antone Rivarol

"There's a lot to be said for the fellow who doesn't say it himself." - Maurice Switzer

"You can best reward a liar by believing nothing he says." - Aristippus

"He does not seem to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing." - Cicero

"In all things it is better to hope than despair." - Goethe

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons." - Emerson

"In the faces of men and women I see God." - Walt Whitman

"God is more truly imagined than expressed, and He exists more truly than He is imagined." - Augustine

"Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait." - Longfellow

"Endurance is patience concentrated." - Thomas Carlyle

"Eloquence is logic on fire." - Lyman Beecher

"I hate to see things done by halves.  If it be right, do it boldly - if it be wrong, leave it undone." - Bernard Gilpin

"Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why." - Henry Van Dyke

"The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity." - Thomas Carlyle

"The dew of compassion is a tear." - Lord Byron

"How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems." - Robert Southey

"Not failure, but low aim, is crime." - James Russell Lowell

"I fear explanations explanatory of things explained." - Abe Lincoln

"Fools admire, but men of sense approve." - Alexander Pope

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, and a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner - and then  to thinking!...I begin to feel, think, and be myself again." - William Hazlitt

"A decent boldness ever meets with friends." - Homer

"All our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart." - Francis Bacon

"In the universe there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors." - William Blake

"Experience has two things to teach.  The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much." - Eugene Delacroix

"On life's vast ocean diversely we sail: Reason's the card, but passion the gale." - Alexander Pope

"Be content to seem what you really are." - Marcus Aurelius

"Our words must seem inevitable." - Yeats

"Being powerful is like being a lady.  If you have to tell people, you aren't." - Margaret Thatcher

"For his heart was in his work, And the heart giveth grace unto every art." - Longfellow

"It is the mark of an educated mind to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle

"Nothing, of course, begins at the time you thought it did." - Lillian Hellman